The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has awarded Klyde Warren Park the 2014 Open Space Award, acknowledging the two-year-old park in Dallas, Texas as an outstanding achievement in urban placemaking.

Klyde Warren Park functions barrier between downtown and uptown

Completed at the end of 2012, Klyde Warren Park, designed by landscape firm, The Office of James Burnett (OJB), is Dallas’ new town square that has literally and figuratively bridged the city’s downtown cultural district with the mixed-use neighborhoods to the north, reshaping the city and catalyzing economic development (see also Topos 85).

Located in downtown Dallas, the 5.25-acre park decks over the sunken Woodall Rogers Freeway, which had been a barrier between downtown and the densely populated Uptown neighborhood. The design merges infrastructure, architecture, and landscape to create a vibrant public open space in the city center.

LEED Gold-certified

The park features flexible, pedestrian-oriented design, offering a mix of active and passive spaces, which include a children’s park, reading room, great lawn, restaurant, performance pavilion, fountain plaza, games area, urban dog park, and botanical garden around a sweeping pedestrian promenade.

LEED Gold-certified Klyde Warren Park incorporates numerous green features, including the use of native tree and plant species; a water reclamation system and a double purification system; solar panels on the light poles and a high-efficiency lighting management system.

Klyde Warren Park was one of five finalists

ULI’s Urban Open Space Award recognizes successful public spaces that have socially and economically enriched and revitalized their communities. It was established in 2009 through the generosity of Amanda M. Burden, former New York City planning commissioner and 2009 recipient of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.

In recognition of the award, Klyde Warren Park will receive $10,000. The project was selected from five finalists. Other four finalists in the 2014 program included Columbus Commons and Scioto Mile in Columbus, Ohio; Guthrie Green in Tulsa, Oklahoma; The Railyard Park and Plaza in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Washington Park in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Find out here which open spaces have been rewarded with the European Prize for Urban Public Spaces in 2014.

Photo: Gary Zvonkovic